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Dixel 0.0.20: a retro CRT effect, canvas rotation, and more

· 3 min read
The Dixel Team
Dixel — Pixel art, built for Android

Dixel 0.0.20 is a big one. It brings a retro CRT effect to your canvas and your exports, adds canvas view rotation, a custom brush, a dither ink, and per-tool brush memory — and it smooths out importing an image. Everything here is free.

A retro CRT look​

Open ⋮ (more) ▸ CRT… and your sprite takes on a classic CRT-screen look: scanlines, a soft phosphor glow, a gently curved tube, an aperture/shadow mask, and a vignette. It's shown live over the whole canvas while you draw, and it's a pure display effect — it changes no pixels, so turning it off gives you your clean art back. Dial it in with Quality, Scanlines, Line spacing, Curvature, Glow, Mask, and Vignette, or hit Reset.

When you export or share, an Apply CRT checkbox lets you save the CRT look or the clean sprite. New in this release, that applies to the timelapse video too — so a shared recording plays back with the same scanlines, glow, mask, and vignette, not just still exports. In Indexed mode your indexed pixels are never touched.

Turn the canvas to a comfier angle​

Some strokes are just easier at an angle. Two-finger twist now rotates the view along with pinch-zoom and pan; let go near upright and it snaps to 0/90/180/270°. There are Rotate left / right and Reset buttons next to Fit, and Fit to screen returns you upright. It rotates only how the artwork is shown — no pixel or file change — so your export and thumbnail are identical.

Two new ways to draw​

Custom brush — copy a pixel area (from a selection or a copied piece), pick the Custom brush, and drag to stamp that bitmap along your stroke, like "new brush from selection" in other editors. The stamp keeps its own size and colours.

Dither ink — a pencil that paints two colours at once, your active colour and a second colour, in a repeating ordered (Bayer) pattern. From a distance the two blend into an in-between shade. The pattern is anchored to the canvas, so touching the same pixels always lands on the same cell.

Your tools remember their feel​

Brush size and opacity now stick across closing the editor and restarting the app. And a new Settings ▸ Input toggle turns on per-tool memory: your Pencil, Eraser, Line, Rect, Ellipse, and Bucket each remember their own size and opacity, so a fat eraser and a 1-px pencil live side by side without re-dragging the slider on every switch. Prefer one shared value? Switch it to global.

A smaller nicety​

Opening a photo as a new project now pre-fills the next free name when the picture's name is already taken — so you can pick an image and tap Create without fixing a name clash by hand.

Happy pixeling.